Leopard Server Password Reminder

Leopard Server's LDAP implementation allows an administrator to set requirements about user passwords, such as length of password, what characters it must include, how often it must be changed, etc. One major oversight on Apple's part is a facility to inform users that their passwords will expire. Maybe if users login via AFP or using Network Home Directories they'd see a message, but we're using LDAP for authentication from a bunch of other servers. As I didn't want to have to remember to remind people to change their passwords, I came up with a script to handle it for me. I've seen other scripts out their, but they made some assumptions that didn't work for us. Our mail server is on a different machine and usernames don't match email addresses, so my solution had to be robust. The only requirement for my script is that the email address has to be filled in for the LDAP entry. Also you must have some facility for users to change his/her own password. We're using a WebObjects program we found to let users do this.

You'll need to change the LDAP server name and the number of days to send out the reminder; we require password changes every 90 days, so I send the reminder seven days before. This is run via a crontab at midnight (or so) each evening.

I'm not an awk master, but this seems to be working fine

#!/bin/sh
datelogfile=/backups/datechange.log
tmpfile=/tmp/passwordchange.tmp
grep -h "changed" /Library/Logs/PasswordService/ApplePasswordServer.Server.log* | awk '{ test=$1 " " $2 " " $3 " " $4; cmd="date -j -f \"%b %d %Y %H:%M:%S\" \047"test"\047 +%s"; cmd | getline day; close(cmd); {printf day " " $13"\n"}; }' | sed s/}/' '/g >> $datelogfile
sort -r $datelogfile | sort -r -k 2 -k 1 - | uniq -f 1 | sort -r - > $tmpfile
cat $tmpfile > $datelogfile

Linux on a cell phone

Like other geeks, I downloaded the Pre webOS SDK and installed it. While I don't have time (I'm not sure where all my time goes) to actually write code (I'd have to learn Javascript which shouldn't be too hard, but lack of time is the problem), I did want to at least kick the tires.

I didn't quite know what to do with the SDK, but reading the "homebrew" forums over on precentral.net, led me to a program in the SDK called novaterm. I hooked up my Pre, ran novaterm, and then got a big smile on my face. Here I was executing commands on the Pre as root. I was able to use top, uptime, as well as navigate the directories. For most users, this doesn't mean much, but I'm a huge Linux/UNIX fan and have been for years. There are just some things that you can only do on a command line or things that are faster to do with a command line. (Luckily Mac OS X gives me the best of both worlds; the beautiful GUI and a command line interface.)

Only in Santa Cruz

This past weekend, I was in Santa Cruz with my family for my in-law's 40th anniversary. While we were sitting in traffic, I saw the passenger of a car get out (traffic was stopped), goto the trunk, open it, open a cooler and pull out what must have been a beer and then got back in the car. That was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that, but it didn't stop there. A few minutes later, the passenger of the car in front of the cooler car, got out, went to the trunk of the cooler car, got something out of the cooler and walked back to his car.

My wife said "only in Santa Cruz". I've only been to Santa Cruz once before, so I don't know if other people do this. It seemed quite strange and depending on if the beverage in question was the alcohol variety and was opened, it could have been illegal.

Competing based on quality, price, and service

The other day I saw a sign in front of a house advertising the company that was putting the new coating on a house. The sign said "woman owned business". That kind of sign irks me because I'd hope that a company can compete on the quality of its product, the price, and the service it provides. I don't really care if a business is minority owned or woman owned; if two products or services were identical, maybe I'd go with a minority owned business, but why advertise this on a sign?

Years ago I read an article about a husband and wife company (the husband was African-American) who did work for the government. As a minority owned or woman owned business, they would have potentially been awarded more government contracts. The husband and wife would not shift ownership the 1 percent needed to qualify for either minority owned or woman owned. To me, that shows great ethics and I have a lot of respect for them.

While I'm ranting about this, it also reminds me of my #1 choice for colleges. I applied to Rice University and really wanted to go (not sure why now that I look back at it), but was denied admission because they "wanted more women in engineering". There are a few ways to interpret this; the first is that they gave women a head start on whatever scale they used or that if women had equal qualifications as men, the women would get the spots. I have no problems with the latter interpretation, but I really suspect the former. I ended up going to Harvey Mudd College which, at the time, was rated as the top engineering school in the country. I'm pretty sure that they didn't accept more women into the engineering program to even out the program as my class was 1/3 female.

I'm all about competing based on merits and if 2 companies or people have the same qualifications, use whatever method you want to decide who gets the job or position in college.